Name's Jason Thibeault. I'm an IT guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS, science of all stripes (especially space-related stuff), and debating on-line and off. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

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EVENTS

Update: The below is mostly nullified as the bill was sent back to the House with amendments, but died anyway. Thank goodness. Of course, all the other non-trolling-related nonsense mentioned below still stands!

Arizona House Bill 2549 passed both legislative houses last Thursday and is now awaiting approval from Arizona’s governor Brewer. The statute states that,

“It is unlawful for any person, with intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend, to use a ANY ELECTRONIC OR DIGITAL DEVICE and use any obscene, lewd or profane language or suggest any lewd or lascivious act, or threaten to inflict physical harm to the person or property of any person.”

If the electronic devices and means are employed to stalk a victim, the penalty bumps up to a class 3 felony.”

Today is International Blasphemy Day. Atheists everywhere are insulting your invisible deity, whomever he or she might (not) be, in protest of the stripping of rights, in certain countries, to publicly and vocally disbelieve in anything that someone might find offensive. These countries include Canada, in a limited fashion thankfully, but the fact that Canada — one of the most progressive and modern countries in the world — has a blasphemy law is unreal.

Let’s make this perfectly clear. Blasphemy is anything up to and including publicly doubting the existence of a supposedly omnipotent, wrathful and jealous deity. The merest fact that such a deity would be well capable of punishing doubters (and in every religion’s foundational texts, does so!), obviates the need for a blasphemy law as not only redundant, but usurping your deity’s divine right to exact vengeance for slights against him.

Interestingly, in Canada, there’s a proviso that, according to Wikipedia, ‘is not an offence against this section to express in good faith and in decent language, or to attempt to establish by arguments used in good faith and conveyed in decent language, any opinion whatever on any religious subject.’ That, coupled with the fact that atheists are demonstrably better informed about religions than the religious, means only that I have to avoid swearing when debating religion in public in order to have a decent defense against a charge of blasphemy.

Fuck that shit, though. As far as I’m concerned, gratuitous swearing is good enough for television, so it’s good enough for me. There is not a shred of fucking evidence for the deity your dumb ass has postulated, and the burden of proof is on you motherfuckers. Anyone that thinks I should be put in jail for writing that sentence can go fuck themselves.